Three questions will determine your new best friends

What everyone wants from a roommate, best friendship! Photo by Getty Images.

Now that most high school seniors have chosen the direction of their respective futures, many are facing another tough question: “who am I going to live with for the next year of my life?”

Now, this is nowhere near as stressful as choosing between colleges or planning out your financial future, but the person (or people) you choose to room with can make or break your college experience, as I’ve heard first hand from lots of people. Many people leave college with their new, life-long best friends while others only have horrible memories of roommates gone wrong.

Less than 10 years ago roommate selection was left almost to chance, with applicants answering a few questions about sleep, study and living habits, hoping to be matched with a compatible and equally-worried freshman that wouldn’t destroy their property, invade their personal space or cause a scene walking into their dorm room at 3 a.m. every weekend. The only way to avoid this was to room with someone you knew from home, which really eliminates the goal of college: to discover yourself through new experiences and acquaintances.

Everyone wants fun experiences like this! Photo by Getty Images.

Today, although many colleges still ask these same questions, social media has allowed students to connect with future classmates from across the country, eliminating the stress of random room assignments and clashing personalities. Many colleges create Facebook groups for incoming freshman to get to know each other and find people with similar interests, while sites like RoomSurf.com provides a detailed personality survey and then compares your scores with your classmates to help you find the perfect person (or group of people) to make the first year of college the best possible.

All that’s left to stress about for this new college-bound generation of internet-savvy teenagers is praying that our roommate requests go through without a hitch and we wind up exactly where we hope to be. Worst case scenario: splitting from your preferred dorm or suitemates and meeting new ones leaves you with more friends to connect with during the first weeks of school, and that doesn’t sound too bad to me either.